Blues for Alice

When you get in on a try you never learn it back

umpteen times the tenth part of a featured world

in black and in back it’s roses and fostered nail

bite rhyme sling slang, a song that teaches without

travail of the tale, the one you longing live

and singing burn

It’s insane to remain a trope, of a rinsing out

or a ringing whatever, it’s those bells that . . .

and other riskier small day and fain would be

of the soap a sky dares

but we remand,

that we a clasp of the silence you and I, all of

tiny sphering rates back, I say to told wall, back

and back and leave my edge, and add an L

Night is so enclosed we’ll never turn its page

its eye, can be mine will be yours, to see all the people

the underneath livid reaching part and past of the lying buildings

the overreacher stops and starts, at in his head, in

in her rhythm

that knowledge is past all of us, so we flare and tap

and top it right up, constant engage and flap in on

keeping pace, our whelming rift, and soil and gleam

and give back the voice, like those eary dead

Step down off our whelm lessons and shortly fired

enter the bristle strum of Corrosion Kingdom

where the last comes by first ever ring, every

race through that tunnel of sun drop and pencil

in the margins of a flare, of higher wish than dare,

the stroked calmings of a line will spin and chime

in blue quicks of a dream blues, the chores

of those whispering gone crenulations

To meet a care is to dial redeem

and we limp in the time sound balms

so out of kilter is my name in the sun, and I win

in the moon and you sing in that other spelling of win

the way a blue is never singular

Source: Sound as Thought: Poems 1982-1984 (Green Integer, 1990)